Square Enix has revealed combat for Vincent Valentine and Cid Highwind.
GosuGamers is down in Tokyo, Japan this week to cover one of the biggest gaming conventions of the year: Tokyo Game Show. This five-day long event features demos and previews for upcoming games like Final Fantasy VII Revelation, which we were fortunate enough to play a press demo for, thanks to Square Enix.
This demo is rather different compared to the previous slice of game shown off at Gamescom, which focused on the flying ship Highwind and the game’s open world elements. This time around, I got to play ostensibly the opening chapter of the game, which sees Cloud and his party explore the Whirlwind Maze, a desolate area at the bottom of the North Crater filled with zombies and monsters.
This demo served to highlight the game’s new playable characters Vincent Valentine and Cid Highwind, along with the party’s new FITS costumes. Read on for our full impressions below.
Final Fantasy VII Revelation
Developer: Square Enix
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S, and PC
Release date: 8 April, 2027
What was in the Final Fantasy VII Revelation Tokyo Game Show demo?
Square Enix dropped a new playable demo for Final Fantasy 7 Revelation at Tokyo Game Show, dropping players right into the thick of it. The demo begins with a “Special Chapter” that seemingly takes place at the start of the game, with Cloud and his party following robed subjects of Hojo’s experiments in an attempt to follow Sephiroth’s trail. This journey takes them into the Whirlwind Maze, a barren land infused with Mako in the North Crater.
Here, I got to play through a roughly 20-minute segment featuring Cloud’s almost-full party (the Aerith of it all aside), bantering among themselves and slowly, if unknowingly, losing their minds to Mako poisoning. This culminates in a fight with a large creature called Gigas, and ultimately a tender meeting between Cloud and Sephiroth, where the two embrace.
While the game’s story seems as promising as ever–largely balanced on the strength of its leading protagonists’ banter–the combat was the clear star of the show here. We finally got hands-on with new party members Vincent Valentine and Cid Highwind, both of whom joined the party in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, but remained unplayable until now.
Vincent Valentine plays much like you would expect; he’s a ranged character who fires off the Cerberus pistol or transforms into a vampiric beast. After transforming, he can deal more damage at the cost of slowly building up a meter that can reduce his HP. There’s a fine line between surviving and dealing heaps of damage as Vincent, which falls in line with his vampiric theme.
On the other hand, Cid Highwind’s combat kit is decidedly more simple. His lance can be used for two quick attacks before he shifts stances and begins glowing blue. After that, his attacks can shift into a flurry of devastating stabs, which can make quick work of enemies. He also has quite a few dragoon-themed abilities under his belt as well, leaving him a relatively simple character to grasp.
We also got to try out the game’s new FITS system, which bestows new Final Fantasy Job-like abilities to the party members. It also, much like the name might suggest, bestows the party with some rather stylish fits. In this demo, Cloud had a Summoner FIT on, allowing him to summon Ifrit, Titan, Shiva, and more, while executing enemies in tandem with the summon’s attacks for more damage. It’s a pretty interesting addition to the game, but I do wonder if the new clothing choices will go down well with players.
Thus far, I don’t find myself gravitating to the new outfits any more than the classic costumes for these characters, but that’s just me. We didn’t get to try any of the Highwind exploration seen in the game’s earlier Gamescom demo, but it seemed like the right choice to focus on combat here anyway.
It’s a reminder that this trilogy has already come up with the perfect marriage of real-time and turn-based combat, and it somehow still hasn’t worn out its welcome, three games in.
